cancer
oracknows | August 3, 2009Due to annoying stuff at work and good stuff personally, I didn't have time to grind out my usual bit of Insolence, either Respectful or not-so-Respectful, today. Fortunately, there is a long history on this blog, full of good stuff that I can repost. So, as I did when I went to TAM7, I'm picking a couple of posts for today that originally appeared in August. This one happens to have first appeared in August 2006; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you (and if you have, I hope you enjoy it a second time).
I'll be back tomorrow.
I debated for a while about whether…
oracknows | July 20, 2009Screening for disease, especially cancer, is a real bitch.
I was reminded of this by the publication of a study in BMJ the very day of the Science-Based Medicine Conference a week and a half ago. Unfortunately, between The Amaz!ng Meeting and other activities, I was too busy to give this study the attention it deserved last Monday. Given the media coverage of the study, which in essence tried to paint mammography screening for breast cancer as being either useless or doing more harm than good, I thought it was imperative for me still to write about it. Better late than never, and I was…
oracknows | July 15, 2009I tell ya, I'm gone for a few days, and the woo-meisters take over the store!
Seriously, I was really, really tempted to blog this over the weekend, even though I was at The Amazing Meeting and even though I had promised myself that I would not blog during the meeting. It was that tempting. Now it's a few days after I first learned about it, and I wondered it it was still worth blogging.
It is.
The story begins with, seemingly innocently enough, a press release by the Lymphoma Association:
We are delighted to announce the appointment of our new Chief Executive, Sally Penrose.
Sally joined us…
oracknows | July 14, 2009Rerun time is over.
Very early Monday morning, a plane touched down, a car drove along a dark and deserted freeway, and my wife and I found ourselves finally back at home. True, we did have a late night diversion to Denny's because we were starving, but by 2 AM or so we were back home. Time to go to bed. Time to go back to work. No more Las Vegas. No more The Amaz!ng Meeting.
Now what?
I probably should have written this yesterday, or on the plane. It's really amazing how fast impressions become memory and memory morphs and fades. But I was simply too tired. I used to be able to adjust to a…
oracknows | July 10, 2009I'm currently in Las Vegas anxiously waiting for The Amazing Meeting to start. Believe it or not, I'll even be on a panel later today! While I'm gone, I'll probably manage to do a new post or two, but, in the meantime, while I'm away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I'll be reposting some Classic Insolence from the month of July in years past. (After all, if you haven't been following this blog at least a year, it'll be new to you. And if you have I hope you enjoy it again.) This particular post first appeared in July 2006.
I have to apologize for last week's Dose of Woo. No, I'm not…
oracknows | July 9, 2009I'm currently in Las Vegas anxiously waiting for The Amazing Meeting to start. Believe it or not, I'll even be on a panel later today! While I'm gone, I'll probably manage to do a new post or two (or three), but, in the meantime, while I'm away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I'll be reposting some Classic Insolence from the month of July in years past. (After all, if you haven't been following this blog at least a year, it'll be new to you. And if you have I hope you enjoy it again.) This particular post first appeared in July 2006.
Alright, I admit it.
I went a little overboard…
oracknows | July 9, 2009I'm currently in Las Vegas anxiously waiting for The Amazing Meeting to start. Believe it or not, I'll even be on a panel! While I'm gone, I'll probably manage to do a new post or two, but, in the meantime, while I'm away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I'll be reposting some Classic Insolence from the month of July in years past. (After all, if you haven't been following this blog at least a year, it'll be new to you. And if you have I hope you enjoy it again.) This particular post first appeared in July 2007.
"What do you think about second hand smoke?" he asked me. I sensed…
oracknows | July 8, 2009I'm currently in Las Vegas anxiously waiting for The Amazing Meeting to start. Believe it or not, I'll even be on a panel! While I'm gone, I'll probably manage to do a new post or two, but, in the meantime, while I'm away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I'll be reposting some Classic Insolence from the month of July in years past. (After all, if you haven't been following this blog at least a year, it'll be new to you. And if you have I hope you enjoy it again.) This particular post first appeared in July 2008.
Last week, The New York Times started a rather unusual series in its…
oracknows | July 7, 2009Almost exactly a year ago, I noted the very sad case of Jeremy LaBrie, an 8 year old autistic child with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma whose mother Kristen withheld his medications and failed to take him to appointments with his oncologist. As a result of his failing to undergo his complete course of chemotherapy, his cancer returned with a vengeance. As of one year ago, his odds of survival were estimated to be no more than 10-20%, after having had a good prognosis when initially diagnosed. At the time, I thought it was entirely appropriate for the state to prosecute Kristen LaBrie for medical…
terrasig | July 1, 2009
Dear PharmGirl,
We wanted to make this note public today because a great many of our blog friends know of your dedication as a physician, wife, and a mother.
Yesterday you finished an association with an academic medical institution where you have been for half your life. From young women with breast cancer to old men in the V.A. Hospital, literally thousands have been touched by your gifts of intelligence, remarkable clinical judgment, and, perhaps most importantly, compassion. The recognition from your patients was abundant and we were privy to the personal notes of just how much you…
oracknows | July 1, 2009Remember Sharyl Attkisson?
She's the CBS reporter who can really bring home the crazy when it comes to vaccines and autism, laying down some serious crankery (complete with many logical fallacies) and hit pieces on Dr. Paul Offit. Indeed, at times she gives Mike Adams a run for his money when it comes to laying down the pseudoscience and crankery. Worse, she appears to be in bed with at least one of the bloggers at the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism for the purpose of bringing antivaccination lunacy to the masses by assisting them in smearing Voices for Vaccines. Indeed, aside from…
oracknows | June 30, 2009I waited.
I knew it was coming. It had to. History was on my side. My quarry was nutty, but in a way exceedingly predictable. it wasn't so much that I knew exactly what he would do. He wasn't predictable in that way. It was that I knew he would do something crazy. Actually, on second thought, I did know what he was going to do. I had only to consider how ghoulishly he treated Tony Snow and Bernie Mac, and Tim Russert and how he leapt at the opportunity to abuse Christina Applegate. To him, when a dying celebrity like Patrick Swayze rejected quackery, it was more than he could stand. Whenever…
oracknows | June 29, 2009This is just a brief followup to my post this morning about yesterday's NYT article on cancer research. An excellent discussion of the NYT article can be found here (and is well worth reading in its entirety). In it, Jim Hu did something I should have done, namely check the CRISP database in addition to PubMed. A couple of key points follow about the examples cited in the NYT article.
Regarding Dennis Slamon:
I hate to criticize Dennis Slamon, because the HER2 to Herceptin story is a great one. But the image one gets of his research program being saved by a friend from Revlon while the NCI…
mikethemadbiologist | June 29, 2009Yesterday's article by Gina Kolata about cancer research mistakes a symptom--caution due to a perceived lack of funding--for the disease, which is the symbiosis between academia and the NIH. Don't get me wrong, a lot of research should involve academics. But the priorities of NIH have become overwhelmed by the priorities of academia. I think Kolata's dead on target with this part of her article (italics mine):
One major impediment, scientists agree, is the grant system itself. It has become a sort of jobs program, a way to keep research laboratories going year after year with the…
oracknows | June 29, 2009A couple of weeks ago, NEWSWEEK science columnist Sharon Begley wrote an article entitled From Bench To Bedside: Academia slows the search for cures. It was a rather poorly argued bit of polemic, backed up only with anecdotes that came across as sour grapes by scientists whose grant proposals the NIH had decided not to fund, and based on many misconceptions she had regarding basic science versus translational research, journal impact factors, and how journals actually determine what they will publish. Not suprisingly, Begley's article caught flak from others, including Mike the Mad Biologist…
mikethemadbiologist | June 28, 2009I'll have more to say about this tomorrow, but I wanted to draw your attention to an article in today's NY Times that is critical of cancer research by Gina Kolata. Here's a snippet:
Many other grants involve biological research unlikely to break new ground. For example, one project asks whether a laboratory discovery involving colon cancer also applies to breast cancer. But even if it does apply, there is no treatment yet that exploits it.
The cancer institute has spent $105 billion since President Richard M. Nixon declared war on the disease in 1971. The American Cancer Society, the…
oracknows | June 25, 2009Unfortunately, I saw this coming, although I had thought that it might be a few more months. Farrah Fawcett has lost her three year battle with anal cancer:
Farrah Fawcett, an actress and television star whose good looks and signature flowing hairstyle influenced a generation of women and bewitched a generation of men, beginning with a celebrated pinup poster, died Thursday morning in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 62 and lived in West Los Angeles.
Her death, at St. John's Health Center, was caused by anal cancer, which she had been battling since 2006, said her spokesman, Paul Bloch.
To an…
oracknows | June 25, 2009Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the reason for Apple CEO Steve Job's five month medical leave of absence from Apple is that he needed a liver transplant, which, according to the story, he underwent a couple of months ago in Memphis. In my discussion, I assumed, for the most part, the most likely clinical scenario, namely that Steve Jobs' insulinoma had metastasized to his liver and that the liver transplant had been done for that indication, but, as some pointed out, it was possible that Jobs had somehow fried his liver without his tumor having metastasized. Unlikely,…
oracknows | June 24, 2009The other day, I came across an update on the Daniel Hauser saga. Specifically, I commented about how he is not only undergoing the chemotherapy ordered by his doctors. As you may recall, Hauser is a 13-year-old boy who, after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma and undergoing one round of chemotherapy, refused to undergo any more. His mother supported him, and ultimately a judge had to order Daniel's parents to make sure that he underwent standard therapy for his very curable form of cancer. Daniel's mother Colleen took off with him shortly afterward, rumored to be heading for Tijuana.…
oracknows | June 23, 2009Over the last month or so, I've written numerous posts about Daniel Hauser. Danny, as you recall, is the 13-year-old Minnesota boy who was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma back in February, underwent one round of chemotherapy for it, and then decided that he wanted to pursue quackery instead of more chemotherapy. His mother supported his decision and justified it by appealing to a faux Native American religion known as Nemenhah, which is, in reality, nothing more than an excuse for its originator, a wannabe who named himself Chief Cloudpiler, to sell quackery under the guise of "Native…